I got inspired by comma.ai – it’s a HW device which will drive your car, pretty much like Tesla does but for a fraction of it’s price. For this, it needs to connect to CAN bus of your car. My current car cannot be driven by wire but it has some simple CAN buses so I decided to have a little play with one of them, just to explore the technology. Continue reading Playing with CAN bus→

I started using virtualenv for all python apps I run (because I hate to make mess with pip in system site-packages). Later I’ve found out that some dependencies can not be installed via pip but are included in standard system packages installed via apt or yum. To use these imports inside your venv, you need to specify parameter –system-site-packages when creating your venv. If you only find out that you really need them later, you can enable them by deleting following file:your_venv_dir/lib/pythonXXX/no-global-site-packages.txt

I needed to fabricate some PCBs. I’ve seen some youtubers to advertise and recommend this service so I decided to give it a try. My order was done without using any affiliation link or discount code so there was no way for them to know who I am. I needed to create a microSD breakout board and luckily I found a similar OSHw project and only made some modifications: https://github.com/danielkucera/MicroSD_Sniffer . I prepared my board in Eagle and generated gerber files. Continue reading My unbiased experience with JLCPCB→

I’m using a wildcard cert from letsencrypt. Currently there is only one way how to verify that you hold the domain you are requesting cert for: creating TXT record in that domain. You can do it by hand when asked by certbot but you don’t want to do this each 90 days. If you are running your own DNS servers with PowerDNS like me there’s an elegant solution: RFC2136. This allows you to update your zones without writing config files and restarting anything.

If you are dealing with network monitoring, you might consider using SMSes because they are completely independent. On the other hand, many monitoring systems don’t support HTTP calls (which is the usual way for sending them) but most of them support sending e-mails. Here I want to describe how to configure your server to receive e-mails and transform them to SMSes. Continue reading E-mail to SMS→

In my current flat the central heating runs on natural gas and I wanted to have a nice chart showing its consumption. The gas meter is directly in the hallway so everyone can see it. Because of this, I cannot simply bring in AC power and attach some exposed wires, otherwise my neighbors would probably call anti-terrorist group. The measuring device has to be small, look professional and have low power consumption so it can run on batteries. In next lines I’ll describe how I have achieved this.